I was reading the Daily Mail’s coverage of Ed Miliband’s interview in which he said that he didn’t do god. He did of course say he has great respect for people who do and I may write about that later (I haven’t heard Cameron say he has great respect for non-believers, persumably because that’s most of us) but one thing I did find interesting was the Daily Mail poll which asked the following.
Does it matter that Ed Miliband does not believe in God?
Let’s pretend it isn’t offensive for them to suggest that the idea that his is an atheist makes him a bad person (one wonders whether they would have run a poll on “does it matter that x is a Muslim?”) and consider how to answer it.
My first reaction was to tick “no.” Because we all know what the poll is really about – as outlined above, do we think the fact that Ed Miliband is an atheist is detrimental to his character. If you answer yes, you do think that, if you answer no you don’t think that.
But of course it isn’t as simple as that. In actual fact, when considering the question does it matter to me that Ed Miliband is a non-beliver the answer is, yes it does. It matters a great deal to me! Just not in the way that the Daily Mail would imagine it might.
In fact, it probably matters to a lot of people. This is a man who could well be the prime minister of the United Kingdom in a few years time – it matters a great deal that he isn’t some mad crackpot religious nut. Especially when the last one turned out to be hiding his religious quackery until after he had sent hundreds of British servicemen to their deaths after some good healthy praying about it.
So yes, it does matter that Ed Miliband is an atheist. It’s great news.
For the record, at the time of casting my vote, 61% said it didn’t matter, with the other 39% saying it did.
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Tags: atheist, daily mail, ed miliband, labour
This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 29th, 2010 at 4:52 pm and is filed under Religion & Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.